Smacked upside the head with shared delusion
How about ten years ago? Let’s try to make it even easier question: are wage-earners better off than they were 40 years ago? If you’re old enough, you may even have first-hand understanding. Please, think back to those times if you can.
Wage-earners work their tails off for someone else, that’s what wage-earners do. They work to survive and, if they are responsible, they work to better their life and the lives of their family. But being “responsible”, I’m afraid, actually means letting others convince you that what you are doing can make you better off than you were before. It is a con-job. More than half of us are not better off than we were four, ten or 40 years ago; in fact, more than half of our wage-earners are worse off.
The wages paid to the majority of wage-earners has dropped over the years from 1970 to 2010. To counteract a common misunderstanding, do not confuse dollars with buying power. Yes, to be sure, the number of dollars per hour for a minimum wage did increase from $1.60 to $7.25 over this time period.
So, what did $1.60 buy in 1970? One answer is that you could get 4 loaves of bread; food is a good example of purchasing that really matters. In 2010, how many loaves of bread can your hour’s work at minimum wage buy? This time the answer is about 3. See why we now have multiple wage-earners in a household? It’s not to obtain items of luxury; it’s to keep food on the table.
Let’s look over some real numbers concerning the most important meal of the day – breakfast.
Here’s a breakfast menu any mother would be proud of … before we started believing all the informational tripe that try to pull you in so many different and often contradictory directions each day. The following compares a breakfast from 1970 to one from 2008 because accepted historical data is available online.
A couple cups of coffee * A glass of milk * Two eggs * Hash browns * Two slices of toast with butter * Three strips of bacon * An orange
Hungry? 
In 1970, the ingredients for this breakfast would have cost about 51 cents. At the then-current minimum wage, this represented about 19 minutes of work.
By 2008, one should expect that modern society had figured how to make work better-paying and the cost of essentials, like breakfast, go down at least somewhat. It didn’t: the ingredients for the same breakfast cost $2.86. Working at the minimum wage now requires you to dedicate 26 minutes of work to pay for that same breakfast.
Get it? After 40 years of so-called economic progress, you now have to work 36% longer to get the same amount of food!
OK, so you don’t want to talk about those who only earn minimum wage (even though the numbers in that group are swelling large). Then, as most statisticians prefer anyway, let’s talk about median income. By definition, half of the entire workforce makes less than this while the other half makes more. It is a much more interesting number than “average” or “mean” which loses it’s usefulness when there are very high or very low wages to consider. The median wage in 1970 was $3.4177 per hour; in 2008 the median wage was $15.5721. Even though the dollar amount of the wage is 3.56 times higher than it was in 1970, your breakfast in 2008 cost 4.58 times as much! You lose, again. In fact, you’ve lost ground every year for 40 years straight … at this rate, breakfast will eventually become an unaffordable luxury. Maybe not for you, but your children and your nephews and nieces are assuredly being set up for tough times as honest wage-earners. Is there any reason for you to accept this state of affairs? Any at all?
Don’t listen to anyone who suggests you should “tighten your belt”, “get a second job”, “convince your spouse to enter the workforce too”, “just get a better paying job” or any other such nonsense. Punch ‘em in the nose, if you want – I sure won’t stop you. Such people want you to continue to be deceived and tricked; they want you to just stop complaining and to get more work from you while paying you wages for your labor that can’t keep up with the cost of living. With or without greedy intent, those people need an education, so to speak. If the folks saying those things aren’t the ones becoming wealthy by your labor, then they are simply deluded fellow wage-earners who fuel this disparate economy by continuing to believe the ubiquitous but false promises.
It has not been the wage-earners who have (directly) been responsible for this decrease in purchasing power. There is no fault, except perhaps ignorant complacency, to ascribe to wage-earners.
It is, however, quite disgusting to notice how the minority in our society – those whose needs are secure – wail about their losses, their challenges to maintain profitability and financial growth, and the assaults on their freedom. Their wealth is actualized only by the continued, slow destruction of those lives who enable the growth of wealth. The fairy-tale story of opportunity, that you too can be rich if only you work hard and do whatever it takes, coupled with opulence paraded by the rich, serve with sad effectiveness to deceive the wage-earners into continued belief in highly improbable results.
As these horrible decades have shown, blind acceptance of that fairy-tale and the witnessing of increasingly spectacular artifacts of wealth have been the machine that allows the very few to continue to take deeply personal advantage of the very many. You can probably guess which side I want to be on when the wage-earners wake up from this poison-apple slumber.
Somehow, we have been deceived into thinking that a home with multiple wage-earners is a sign of actively creating the opportunity to achieve greater prosperity. Mommy AND daddy going to work is what has made our family “better off”. Hogwash. It’s an insidious lie that more than one wage-earner in a household is chosen to increase prosperity in that household. But, really, what value can you put on rearing one’s own children and not be required to hire someone for daycare? What value has preparing meals for one’s family, or even having the opportunity of time to do so? How can we even come to grips with the cost of a perpetually harried existence in the “rat race” if, as for generations now, we accept it as required of us?
Multiple wage-earners in today’s household is a doomed attempt to counteract the lowering of real wages that has marched forward, unabated, for so many decades. That trend is part and parcel of our culture; never-ending growth of businesses and GDP require that real wages always trend down. The fantasy belief that a nation’s economy can grow forever hinges on the corollary that real wages must always be driven lower.
The wage-earner’s productivity has continually and strongly increased over the last forty years. In fact, the productivity of wage-earners has increased an astonishing 75% between 1970 and 2010. This is what has fueled the meteoric increase in our nation’s GDP to the huge number it is now … rising 12 times higher, from about $1 Trillion to over $14 Trillion, over those same four decades.
Are you beginning to see an elephant in the room? Perhaps you are feeling an unidentifiable, nagging question you can’t quite find words for. Here, let me help: If our nation’s economy, our GDP, has grown by such a huge amount, and most of our nation’s wage-earners get paid with less and less buying-power, where did that stupendous increase in wealth go to anyway?
The answer is simple and readily discovered. It went to those who are already rich, and it made them much, much richer.
The wealthiest 1% of Americans who get paid an income (I cannot possibly bring myself to call them wage-earners) received half of the increase in national wealth. One in every one hundred of those rich folks ares in a group by themselves, sometimes called the super-rich. They alone claimed a full one-third of the nation’s increased wealth. So, over the last 40 years, only 50% of the GDP increase was allowed to be shared by 99% of the population of wage-earners who, as most understand, actually performed the work that was necessary to cause the increase i
n the GDP. Wasn’t that nice of them?
Like it or not, wage-earners have been handing over most of the increase of national wealth to the already-rich; the excesses of the rich are being subsidized by the voluntary loss of wealth from the majority of citizens. Yes, it really is that simple. We let the rich take so much that we get left with less every year, year after year. You might think that if we didn’t want to just hand over the lion’s share of the wealth that we the wage-earners create, then we would be really angry.
It is our delusional fantasy that one day, through hard work and doing whatever the boss wants, that we, too, can be obscenely rich. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead, by holding that myth so sacred, we allow ourselves to pay an ever increasing price in mental and physical health in order to keep making the welfare payments for those oh-so-worthy rich folks. There will be no end to this absurdity unless wage-earners come to their senses. This grotesque inequality will continue and the size of the difference will keep growing. The sooner we begin thinking clearly about this situation and rid ourselves of these entitlements given willingly to the rich, the less violent will be the inevitable socio-economic “correction.”
In conclusion, I feel a need to apologize for the tone of this post. My commentary seems unnecessary given the theme of this blog – aligning with those who would simply walk away. However, I feel that these myths are so strong, unrecognized and impactful that I am compelled, for the good of us all, to present these facts in a similarly strong way. My hope is that, after reading this and doing your research, you come to realize the implications of this utterly unsustainable path and find the courage to start walking away from it. With my deepest respect, I leave it to you to find your walking path.
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